Difference between real production app and class project

Henhen

I am not sure if this is the right place to ask this, but I recently graduated from my University and am seeking a full time employment as a Node, JavaScript, Express, HTML, CSS, React, Redux, MongoDB, MySQL full stack developer. My employers seem to want more experience but what I want to know is, how different are real production apps compared to a class group project? For example, in terms of syntax and code, is it the same except production apps just have more code? Any references to great resources on this subject would be greatly appreciated?

NogDog

The first thing that jumps to my mind is security considerations; but really it all depends on what your class projects were like and what sort of business product you're looking at.

Maybe the biggest differences are not so much the software as the way you work: office hours instead of evenings and weekends, while being distracted by meetings, planning, division of labor, development processes (Scrum, Kanban, XP...or no real process), code review process, coordinating with clients and other teams (including QA), etc., etc., and so forth.

Henhen

Well what I mean by production apps is things like how is data posted to a database? The way I I have been doing it in my class projects are getting data such as form inputs and storing it in an object such as

var userInfor = {
name: inputValue;
age: inputValue
etc
}

but in a real production app, would the proper way to store data into a database be to make a new instance of a Object/Class
such as
function User(some data passed in){
this.name = data;
etc
}
var person = new User(pass in input values);

//save person to the database

Also how are database models scaled and connected with cloud servers etc.

NogDog

I think you certainly want a decent understanding of RDBMS's and how to interact with them in your server-side code. I'm not a NodeJS guy, but many popular frameworks these days (Ruby on Rails, PHP on Laravel) provide abstraction layers that may minimize how much SQL you need to write; but you should still have a good grasp of DB design, as well as the ability to write SQL when situations come up that are too complex to reasonably handle in the framework's abstraction methods.

But anyway...my biggest suggestion is networking. And I don't mean computer networking. Find ways to get to know other developers, because employee referrals for jobs are way more effective than a great resume. Contributing to open-source projects can be a good way to make contacts (start small, maybe even fixing documentation bugs). Look for local meet-ups and users' groups meetings where you can meet other devs face to face. Help other people on web forums, thus demonstrating your knowledge (which is how I got my current job).